Second Place

by Rachel Cusk

the evil that usually lies undisturbed beneath the surface of things rose up and disgorged itself over every part of life.

don’t think I realised how many parts of life there were, until each one of them began to release its capacity for badness.

Fear is a habit like any other, and habits kill what is essential in ourselves. I was left with a kind of blankness, Jeffers, from those years of being afraid.

Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented? Do you understand it, Jeffers? I have wanted to be free my whole life and I haven’t managed to liberate my smallest toe.

There is no particular reason, on the surface, why L’s work should summon a woman like me, or perhaps any woman – but least of all, surely, a young mother on the brink of rebellion whose impossible yearnings, moreover, are crystallised in reverse by the aura of absolute freedom his paintings emanate, a freedom elementally and unrepentingly male down to the last brushstroke.

this aura of male freedom belongs likewise to most representations of the world and of our human experience within it, and that as women we grow accustomed to translating it into something we ourselves can recognise. We get our dictionaries and we puzzle it out, and avoid some of the parts we can’t make sense of or understand, and some others we know we’re not entitled to, and voilà!, we participate.

He doesn’t comment and he doesn’t criticise and this puts him in an ocean of silence compared to most people. Sometimes his silence makes me feel invisible, not to him but to myself, because as I’ve told you I’ve been criticised all my life: it’s how I’ve come to know that I’m there.

When people marry young, Jeffers, everything grows out of the shared root of their youth and it becomes impossible to tell which part is you and which the other person. So if you attempt to sever yourselves from one another it becomes a severance all the way from the roots to the furthest ends of the branches, a gory mess of a process that seems to leave you half of what you were before. But when you make a marriage later it is more like the meeting of two distinctly formed things, a kind of bumping into one another, the way whole landmasses bumped into one another and fused over geological time, leaving great dramatic seams of mountain ranges as the evidence of their fusing. It is less of an organic process and more of a spatial event, an external manifestation. People could live in and around Tony and me in a way they could never have entered and inhabited the dark core – whether living or dead – of an original marriage. Our relationship had plenty of openness, but it posed certain difficulties too, natural challenges that had to be surmounted: bridges had to be built and tunnels bored, to get across to one another out of what was pre-formed. The second place was one such bridge, and Tony’s silence ran undisrupted beneath it like a river.

I would have crept away, except that he saw me through the windows the same way I had seen him, and had to come to the door and take his post, still without a stitch on, because he had obviously decided it was better to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Or perhaps nothing had happened, Jeffers – perhaps the world is full of people like Tony and this man, who think there’s nothing to be worried about in seeing and being seen, with clothes or without them!

I immediately felt guilty, while at the same time determined not to have something stolen from me. These two feelings, always coming in a pair, the better to incapacitate and handcuff me – I have been troubled by them right from the beginning, when Justine arrived on this earth and seemed to want to stand in the same spot that I stood in, only I was there first. I could never reconcile myself to the fact that just as you’ve recovered from your own childhood, and finally crawled out of the pit of it and felt the sun on your face for the first time, you have to give up that place in the sun to a baby you’re determined won’t suffer the way you did, and crawl back down into another pit of self-sacrifice to make sure she doesn’t! At that time Justine had just finished college and gone off to Berlin to work for an organisation there, but she often came back to visit seeming faintly unsettled, with a transitory air of immediate need, like a person in a busy station looking around for somewhere to sit while they wait for their train. No matter how nice a seat I found for her, she always preferred the look of the one I was sitting in.

Truly I think Tony believes that talk and gossip are a poison, and this is one of the reasons the people who come here like him so much, because he acts as a kind of antidote to their habit of poisoning themselves and others and makes them feel much healthier. But for me there is a healthy kind of talking, though it’s rare – the kind of talking through which people create themselves by giving themselves utterance. I often had this kind of talk with the artists and other people who came to the marsh, though they were quite capable of the poisonous talk too, and did talk like that a lot of the time. There were enough instances of being in sympathy with one another, of transcending our own selves and mingling through language, for me not to mind it.

Oh, it wasn’t at all how I’d planned it! I feared, suddenly, that my belief in the life I was living wouldn’t hold, and that all I’d built up would collapse underneath me and I’d be unhappy again – I didn’t know, in that moment, how I was going to manage.

How I wished I could just leave it all to him, and go and get into my bed and pull the covers over my head and not have to say another word! But it is not Tony’s business to change places with me, nor I with him. We are separate people, and we each have our separate part to play, and no matter how much I yearned on occasion for that law to be broken, I have always known that the very basis of my life rested on it.

There, standing beside the boat and looking at the same thing I was looking at, was L, and I had no choice but to go to him and greet him, despite the fact that I was not at all ready for an encounter and was still wearing my nightclothes. But I had already understood that this was to be the keynote of my dealings with him, this balking of my will and of my vision of events, the wresting from me of control in the most intimate transactions, not by any deliberate act of sabotage on his part but by virtue of the simple fact that he himself could not be controlled. Inviting him into my life had been all my affair! And I saw suddenly, that morning, that this loss of control held new possibilities for me, however angry and ugly and out of sorts it had made me feel so far, as though it were itself a kind of freedom.

I see that what I was experiencing might simply have been the shock of being confronted by my own compartmentalised nature. All these compartments in which I had kept things, from which I would decide what to show to other people who kept themselves in compartments too! Until then, Tony had seemed to me like the least divided person I had known: he had at any rate whittled it down to two compartments, what he said and did, and what he didn’t say and do. But L felt like the first entirely integrated being I had encountered, and the impulse I had was to catch him, as though he were a wild creature that needed to be ensnared, while at the same time realising that his very nature was not to be caught, and that I would merely have to abide by him in a dreadful freedom.

Not to have been born in a woman’s body was a piece of luck in the first place: he couldn’t see his own freedom because he couldn’t conceive of how elementally it might have been denied him. To beg was a freedom in itself – it implied at least an equality with the state of need. My own experiences of loss, I said, had merely served to show me the pitilessness of nature. The wounded don’t survive in nature: a woman could never throw herself on fate and expect to come out of it intact. She has to connive at her own survival, and how can she be subject to revelation after that?

The resemblance I saw between Kurt and her father was a striking product of my unconscious mind, because I was frightened of the latter and therefore saw him as something menacing and large, whereas Kurt I dismissed as clinging and weak. But Kurt wasn’t weak: men never are. Some of them admit their strength and use it to the good, and some of them are able to make their will to power seem attractive, and some of them resort to deception and connivance to manage a selfishness of which they are themselves somewhat frightened. If Kurt was weak, in other words, then so had Justine’s father been, and this was what the incident with the photograph had revealed to me. So much of power lies in the ability to see how willing other people are to give it to you. What I had dismissed as weakness in Kurt was the same force that had ravaged my life all those years before, and which even now I had only recognised by mistake.

Tony believed that I had done more than my fair share of work, and that what was required of me now in my life with him was to enjoy myself, but what he hadn’t reckoned with was the difficulty of finding pleasure and enjoyment for someone who has never really valued them. He thought I should take pride in what I had survived and what I had achieved, and go around like a sort of queen bee, but meanwhile I had come to view the world as far too dangerous a place in which to stop and congratulate myself. The truth was I had always assumed that pleasure was being held in store for me, like something I was amassing in a bank account, but by the time I came to ask for it I discovered the store was empty. It appeared that it was a perishable entity, and that I should have taken it a little earlier.

Did he understand that by parading his freedom and the fulfilment of his desires in front of me, he was making me less free and less fulfilled than I had been before I walked in the door?

‘It’s all so silly,’ he said softly, half to himself. ‘You get tired of reality, and then you discover it’s already gotten tired of you. We should try to stay real,’

‘I’ve often thought it’s fathers who make painters,’ he said, ‘while writers come from their mothers.’ I asked him why he thought that. ‘Mothers are such liars,’ he said. ‘Language is all they have. They fill you up with language if you let them.’

‘Oh Tony,’ I said, ‘it’s as if I wanted her to get married to Kurt and spend the rest of her life dowdily waiting on him and being held back by him!’ ‘You want her to be safe,’ Tony said, and that was exactly right: by revealing her true beauty and potential, she was somehow less safe than she had been before. I couldn’t bear the thought of the hopes and possibilities that might come from this revelation, and what their crushing might do to her. Safer to go around in a Mother Hubbard, not risking anything!

The truth was that I questioned the value of my love – I wasn’t sure how much benefit it could be to anybody. I loved Justine as it were self-critically: I was working, somehow, to free her from myself, when it appeared that what she needed was to take some of me along with her!

‘It may come as a surprise to you to hear it, but I’m also trying to find a way of dissolving,’ I said to him indignantly, while tears surged in my eyes. ‘That’s why I wanted you to come here. You’re not the only one who feels that way. You can’t just blot me out, because it makes you feel sick to see me – I’m just as untouchable as anyone else! I don’t exist to be seen by you,’ I said, ‘so don’t delude yourself on that point, because I’m the one that’s trying to free myself from how you see me. You’d feel better if you could see what I actually am, but you can’t. Your sight is a kind of murder, and I won’t be murdered any more.’

what I couldn’t understand was how the simple revelation of personal truth could lead to so much suffering and cruelty, when surely it was morally inoffensive to seek to live in a condition of truth.

I had learned since then, I said, that I was naive to expect that other people would merely allow me to change when those changes directly interfered with their own interests, and the revelation that my whole life, which appeared to have been built on love and freedom of choice, was in fact a facade that concealed the most craven selfishness was deeply shocking to me. There is no limit, I said, to what certain people will do to you if you offend them or take away what they want, and the fact that at one time you liked or chose to be among those people is one of the central mysteries and tragedies of life. Yet it is only a reflection, I said, of the very conditions and substances out of which your humanity is made – it is the attempt by selfishness and dishonesty to reproduce themselves in you and to continue to flourish in the world. You might as well go mad, I said, as try to resist that attempt.

I told her she would always be able to find a white man to be obliterated by, if that was what she decided she wanted. When I said that she laughed, and much to my surprise said: ‘Thank God you’re my mother.’

I was in turmoil nonetheless, believing somewhere inside me that if I could become capable of greater generosity, then L would be saved. But who or what did I think I was saving him from? I liked to think I was prepared to go to the ends of the earth for L – but only if he upheld his side of the bargain, and was grateful and polite and fitted in with the pleasant, comfortable vision of life I had offered him. Which he would and could never do!

‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’ he asked me, which in terms of a sacrifice was like him offering to sever his own right arm. ‘Tony,’ I said to him, ‘you are my life – you’re my whole security in living. Where you are, the food I eat tastes better, I sleep better, and the things I see feel real, instead of like pale shadows!’

She put her night painting – number seven – in there: as its owner, she now has the peculiar distinction of being the wealthiest person I know! Though I don’t believe she will ever sell it. But I like to think that, however unwittingly, L gave her freedom, the freedom not to look to others for the means of her survival that is still so hard for a woman to come by.